The recent growth in low-cost access to space through nanosatellites is providing the impetus for increasing the capabilities of these platforms, for example, by increasing the onboard power and downlink rates for applications such as Earth imaging. CubeSats are a very popular platform, available as commercial off-the-shelf kits in sizes that are multiples of the basic 1 U unit, a 10 cm×10 cm×10 cm cube. 3 U CubeSats are currently the most common, with an upward trend towards 6 U.
The limited size of CubeSats imposes strict volume limitations on all subsystems, and particularly on low-frequency antennas, which must be folded for launch within the satellite body and deployed after launch. Popular choices for CubeSat antennas are monopole and dipole antennas; both are available commercially. These can also be combined to mimic circular polarization and thus decrease the pointing accuracy requirement of the satellite. However, these antennas cannot meet the bandwidth and gain requirements imposed by an expanding number of applications. Ongoing research is addressing this gap by identifying specific antenna designs capable of meeting these requirements as well as being packaged in small volumes. A deployable helical antenna developed by the Northrop Grumman Corporation can provide a gain in excess of 10 dB and can be packaged in a 0.5 U CubeSat. Several concepts have been proposed for CubeSat parabolic reflectors including the Ultra-Compact Ka-Band Parabolic Deployable Antenna developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the mesh reflector developed by BDS Phantom Works.
Designing a deployable antenna requires an optimization of performance subject to a combination of electromagnetic and structural constraints. The estimation of electromagnetic performance is usually carried out with numerical simulators, such as Ansys Electronics Desktop, CST and Feko. However, such a process can be quite lengthy if the design space is large, as there are no tools to carry out rapid performance evaluations and comparisons between various concepts. Designer interfaces that include a catalog of various antenna structures have been added to several simulation tools, such as the Antenna Magus tool, an add-on interface to CST and Feko, and the Ansys HFSS Antenna Design Kit. Even with these aids, electromagnetic one-by-one performance evaluation and concept comparison must still be carried out by the designer. Also, geometrically non-linear structural simulations are carried out, usually with finite element software such as Abaqus.
In the structures and materials community, existing databases of material properties allow mechanical engineers to quickly compare material performance. An example is the CES selector which compares materials by graphically representing their performance according to different metrics. These tools are limited to material selection for standard structural problems and do not consider deployment concepts, which is a critical shortcoming addressed by the embodiments of present invention.